Johannesburg City Power has extended the grace period for non-payment of penalty fees to 30 November 2024, beyond the 24 November deadline for prepaid electricity customers to re-code their meters.
This as panicked customers caused long queues at its Service Delivery Centres (SDC’s), with fears of a stampede as emergency personnel were on stand-by to attend to any emergency at some of Eskom’s centres.
“By this afternoon (Sunday) all vending prepaid customers had their meters recorded ahead of the deadline. We have seen an influx of previously non-vending customers to our Service Delivery Centres, especially in Lenasia and Alexandra, seeking assistance ahead of tonight’s cut-off date. We urge the customers not to panic and rush to our offices today as our teams will still be on the ground from Monday 25 November 2024, assisting customers with replacing and installing new meters. City Power has already pre-generated key change tokens for the outstanding non-vending customers,” said the entities spokesperson, Isaac Mangena.
Mangena highlighted that the extension will enable City Power’s officials to assist customers to convert prepaid meters even after tonight’s deadline.
“We have deployed more teams to collect the information of all customers that are already in queues, and we will arrange our technicians to visit them from this coming week, to install new meters and replace those that have been tampered with, at no fee! For those who are still at home, there is no need to rush to the SDCs,” explained Mangena.
He urged customers not to pay any technician, contractor or anyone purporting to be from City Power.
The extension comes on the heels of Eskom’s announcement that customers who have by-passed and damaged meters have been granted an extension to update their meters beyond Sunday’s deadline.
This follows what the power utility described as a technological breakthrough that has enabled Eskom to pre-create Key Change Tokens (KCT) on its online vending system.
“Zero buyers in this situation need to go to their legal vending sites with their meter numbers to buy electricity. They will be issued their Key Change Tokens (KCT) by the vending agents to make their meters KRN2 compliant.
“This action of purchasing credit tokens must be completed before Sunday, 24 November 2024, to trigger the activation of the meter to the KRN2 mode. Once the meter has been activated by the purchase of electricity, the customer can then visit any of the Eskom sites to complete the conversion process,” read a statement from Eskom.
